Tag Archives: Rappaport 2015

1) What brought you to your research subject? How did you come to discover the topic?

I was admitted to the Anthropology and History Program at the University of Michigan with a research project about the impact of U.S. military bases on local communities in Italy. In the summer of 2009—during my first preliminary research trip to Italy—I decided to start from the Archipelago of La Maddalena, where in 1972 the U.S. Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines. The base was closed in February 2008 but I was expecting to find a strong local opposition to the American presence still in place. Instead, I found that many Maddalenini regretted the departure of the U.S. Navy due to the economic benefits of the installation and a sense of local identity forged around the Archipelago’s long military legacy. In some sense, the presence of the U.S. base was perceived as a “natural” continuation of the Archipelago’s role as a maritime fortress strategically positioned in the hearth of the Tyrrhenian Sea. For this reason limited local opposition focused primarily on the risks of contamination related to the presence and operations of the nuclear submarines, which were propelled by nuclear reactors. Both the Italian government and the U.S. Navy claimed sort of exceptional status for the nuclear submarines, treating them as absolutely safe technological artifacts. Only the opposition of several Italian experts (nuclear physicists, health physicists, and radioecologists) and environmental activists pushed the Italian government to institute environmental monitoring, after years of study and organization. My dissertation focused on this story to explore the relationship between national sovereignty, scientific knowledge production, and citizenship in the geopolitical context of the Mediterranean area after World War Two.